John Allan Wyeth
by George J. Dance John Allan Wyeth, Jr. (October 24, 1894 - May 11, 1981) was an American poet and painter, who served in World War I. Life Wyeth was born in New York City, the 3rd and youngest child of Florence Nightingale (Sims) and John Allan Wyeth, Sr. He was educated at the Lawrenceville School, a private preparatory academy in New Jersey, where he was president of the drama club and class poet, and published in the Lawrenceville Literary Magazine. Between 1911 and 1915 he attended Princeton University, where he published in the Nassau Literary Magazine, and where he was an acquaintance of Edmund Wilson. Wyeth earned a M.A. from Princeton in 1917. Wyeth enlisted after the U.S. had entered World War I. He served on the Western Front as a translator in the 33rd Division of the American Expeditionary Force, and later with the army of occupation in Germany. He was discharged in October, 1919. Wyeth was given a fellowship by Princeton to study in Liege, Belgium. In 1920 he returned to Europe, and by 1923 had completed his oral exams. In 1926 Wyeth was in Rapallo, home of Ezra Pound. "Although there is no documentary evidence that Wyeth knew Pound (who moved from Paris to Rapallo in 1924), the English-speaking community was so small that it would have been unlikely for them to have missed one another. (Wyeth family members have confirmed the friendship.)" From Rapallo, Wyeth wrote his graduate adviser that he wished to give up his academic studies to pursue a literary career. In the 1930s Wyeth switched interests and began studying painting. He studied with Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant, in 1932, and then for 6 years with Jean Marchand (also associated with the Bloomsbury Group) at the Académie Moderne in Paris. Wyeth exhibited in Paris, and later in Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and New York, but received only limited critical notice. Wyeth returned to the U.S. in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. During the war he served in the Coast Guard. After the war he lived an itinerant existence in America and Europe, often depending on his family for financial help. He lived for some years in Providence, Rhode Island. By 1979 he was living in a family house in Skillman, New Jersey, where he died in 1981 and was buried in Blawenburg Cemetery. Writing Wyeth's only known collection of poetry is a sonnet sequence, This Man's Army, an account of his World War I experiences published in New York in 1928, which he is thought to have written in Rapallo in 1926. The book "received generally strong but brief coverage.... Nearly every critic remarked on Wyeth’s novel employment of the form, including 'rough dialogue,' jazz music, tags from old songs, slang, and foreign languages, to achieve what the Boston Transcript termed 'a colloquial ease which is most interesting and also technically correct.” The book was reprinted in 1929, but soon forgotten. Some of his poems were reprinted in a 1945 anthology, Poet Physicians, where they were mistakenly attributed to Wyeth's father. They were read in the 1990s by poet and historian Bradley Omanson, who passed a copy of the book to Dana Gioia for his opinion. Gioia included Wyeth's poetry in his 2004 anthology, Best Twentieth-Century American Poems, and wrote a laudatory account of the book in the Hudson Review in 2008. Reviews Morris William Croll (Princeton University): "The problem was to put the image of the war – landscape, human character, dialect, glimpses of its personal sentiment, all that a novel does – put it into the defined form of verse and so convert it into beauty or delight.... In This Man's Army it seems to me that the problem is solved. The limits of the sonnet-form are never transgressed. I mean, first, that the movement of the rhythm is always true sonnet-rhythm, and just as truly in apparently irregular passages, as the apparently regular ones; for the ear does actually hear the inevitable sonnet-beat even in passages imitating jazz-singing. And I mean, secondly, that the drama is always exactly moving towards its sonnet-completion and finality, however photographic the detail may seem to be." Dana Gioia: "An innovative sonnet sequence that combines traditional and Modernist techniques, the book provides a vivid and historically accurate account of an American soldier’s experience in the Great War. Most sonnet sequences bog down under the weight of their own formal machinery. This Man’s Army moves with such steady assurance of style and purpose that it never loses either narrative flow or lyric impulse. A unique and original book, This Man’s Army deserves a small but meaningful place in American literary history." Recognition 3 of Wyeth's poems were included in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Scherke (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Publications *''This Man’s Army: A war in fifty-odd sonnets''. New York: Harold Vinal, 1928.Dana Goia, "The Unknown Soldier: The Poetry of John Allan Wyeth, Hudson Review, LXI:2 (Summer 2008), Web, June 21, 2012. **Boston: Longman's Green, 1929. **University of South Carolina Press (Great War Series), 2008."About John Allan Wyeth," The War Poetry of John Wyeth, Blogspot, Web, June 21, 2012. See also *Sonneteers *List of U.S. poets References External links ;Poems *"Hospital" *Recall Roster, 5 poems (.PDF) ;Books *John Allan Wyeth at Amazon.com ;About *"*"[http://danagioia.com/essays/reviews-and-authors-notes/the-obscurity-of-john-allan-wyeth/ The Obscurity of John Allan Wyeth by Dana Gioia *The War Poetry of John Allan Wyeth weblog Category:1894 births Category:1941 deaths Category:20th-century poets Category:American poets Category:American World War I poets Category:American military personnel of World War I Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:War poets Category:Sonneteers